Horse Ride

by Daniel Braum

“I don’t like the sound of it, dear,” Tommy’s Mother messaged to Tommy’s Dad.

“You said the same thing about the Mariana Trench diving bell and the Mare Crisium observation point.”

“Tommy did get motion sick from the re-entry.”

“And…”

Tommy played with a metallic toy horse as the three of them walked; hand in encounter-suited hand, down Central Park West. A new Spiderman sticker and I love New York decal adorned Tommy’s freshly charged scrubber casing built into his five-star suit.

The sunny afternoon brought the tourists out, strolling in their white “spacesuits” as the locals called them. The thrum of the photovoltaic skin on the skyscrapers adjusting position filled the air with an excited buzz.
“Can’t wait for the horses,” Tommy thought. His settings were on “link” so the thought instantly transmitted to his Dad

His Dad was pleased and transmitted an image of a smiling Spiderman face to his son, a custom image he had purchased just for these sentiments.

Up ahead a car tried to park and bumped into the last of the bulky metallic hulks lined up at the curb.

“Can’t you read,” a horse attendant yelled, out loud, his voice tinny through his old strapped on scrubber. “These spots are for horses only.”

He pointed to the street sign, a stylized horse head inside the outline of a human skull, then made a rude gesture at the vehicle as it sped away. He bent down to inspect the rear leg of the motionless steel hulk.

“Horses, Daddy. I see them,” Tommy messaged.

Tommy’s Dad sent the smiling custom image again.

The attendant ratcheted open the horse’s leg casing. Bone, skin and fluid tubes were briefly exposed to the afternoon before he sealed it up again.

“The poor horses,” Tommy’s Mom messaged.

“Don’t worry. They have it good,” replied Tommy’s Dad. “Coming this time, dear?”

“No.”

Tommy’s Dad had taken his son squid cage diving to the bottom of the Tasman Sea, to three of the four civilian Lunar observation stations, and even on a riverboat deep into the Heart of the Amazon oxygen retention area. Tommy’s Dad wanted him to taste the world. To experience it all for real and not at home through uploads like most everyone else.

The attendants lifted Tommy and placed him atop the horse. They placed his hand in the connection cradle, an opening on the horse’s neck and strapped the cortex interface onto his suit.

“Hold on tight,” the attendant said. Out loud. Then fired the controlled burst of electricity that stopped Tommy’s heart.

Then Tommy was above the city on the back of a white winged horse. Along with other riders he circled the buildings. They were not aged and crumbling but new and shiny and pristine. Tommy remembered his Dad had said when you got close you could see people inside. Ghosts. The permanent kind.

Instead of banking toward the skyscraper wall, Tommy’s horse went up and up and up. Tommy wanted it to come back. But there was nothing he could do. It just rose into the black and did not stop.

#

Ambulance sirens blared.

“Where is he?” Tommy’s father asked an attendant. Out loud.

“We’re doing all we can,” he said.

“Find my son,” Tommy’s mother cried.

The attendant gently lifted Tommy’s body off the horse and placed him, interface and all, into the rear of the ambulance. Fluid leaked from the rear leg of the horse’s metal shell.

– END –

The Living Word

by Trent Walters

In a world full of trillions of otherwise wasted, tasteless words printed on trillions of otherwise wasted, bleached tree pulp–from the papyrus to the pine–this one word is deliciously alive. I won’t tell which. You wouldn’t believe it if it were so easy. It isn’t: the paradoxical architecture of its lettered spine: curved yet straight. But it is easy: more ancient than coelacanths yet more spry… and sly: the way it creeps, it stalls, it crawls and breathes on the sly. It slips, it slides and plays possum when your eye lands upon its black frames in that wintry wasteland of bleach pulp snow–a frozen and fallow ground–waiting for your eye to grow weary and blink so it can exhale and inhale in the space of that eternity. It bides its time. You will turn the page. You will move on. You have dishes to do, garbage to take out. Meanwhile, it has rearranged the neural map of your brain–former dead ends are superhighways, and once indispensable bridges are washed out (you can still take that bridge though you’re liable to baptize yourself and drown in what is clearly now just a chugging, churning muddy wastewater).

As you cinch the trash-bag ends closed, you see the garbage differently. With the bag slung over one shoulder, clinking gently against your back, you half-consciously mutter conjugations of sounds you’d forgotten you knew. Slowly, you roll your tongue over various viable words, tasting their liveliness.

Outside, mercantile semis jostle futilely for pole position, apply their clamorous airbrakes against the crisp, clean silence, pass in their light regalia like toppled Christmas trees trucking above the Interstate 80 viaduct. You gaze up in wonder at stars as you trudge through knee-deep snow that melts and trickles into your bedroom slippers and through the night’s bitter cold that nips at your fingers and toes.

How do you know it lives if it hides in plain sight? It nudges other words, testing their livelihood compared to its, rolling them aside like slow heavy stones to see where they might go, toward places you haven’t heard their torpid frames clink before. One word occupies the snowy space here instead of there, alters the stories less on the page than in your brain–not enough to change the plots or meanings, rendering the books wholly different, but enough to see your garbage differently.

And, otherwise on an other wise tongue, it is all garbage.